June Brown (Dot Cotton)

The show had been running for 20 weeks when I joined. Wendy Richard (Pauline Fowler) had been keen to create a family atmosphere so I felt like a spare prick at a wedding. I'd sit in a corridor waiting to go on set, worried that everyone was thinking, "What's she doing hanging around here?"

I'd seen an early episode but there was a lot of shouting so I'd switched it off. I wasn't into soaps. In those days, it could ruin your career because you'd be typecast. Leslie Grantham (Den Watts) suggested me for the part of Dot Cotton after seeing me in Minder. I'm sure I got the job because, during my interview with the show's co-creator Julia Smith, I told her I had to leave to be in time for another rehearsal. She valued punctuality and commitment.

Since Dot was supposed to be a peripheral character, I was only given a three-month contract, but six weeks in she'd taken on a life of her own and they asked if I would be permanent. I'd had a dreadful year and thought my career was down the drain, so I accepted. At the start, Dot's character seemed to be nothing but a list of illnesses; the focus was all on her murdering son, Nick. So I realised that if I was going to make something of her, I had to work out why she was so ill. I decided she was a hypochondriac because she was loveless and unsupported. But underneath she was kind and I've always insisted her Christianity isn't played for laughs. A little girl once wrote to me saying she was coming to live with me – because Dot always stuck up for her son.

I didn't know much about the East End and I didn't go trudging round to research it – couldn't be bothered with all that – but my grandmother was a cockney so I used her voice for Dot. I don't think it sounded very real at the beginning. In the early days, we actors had no input. Julia was quite a taskmaster. When Nick was supposed to start a gay relationship with Lofty, John Altman, who played Nick, told her he didn't feel it was in character. When he left the room, Julia said: "Write him out!" They did.

We'd often have to improvise. Once, Dot was supposed to be looking after Willie, Ethel's dog, but they'd forgotten to bring Willie in so I took the lead and held it at an angle to make it look as if the dog was there. One of the actors pretended to step over the non-existent creature and broke wind. We had to stop filming: when you're under high pressure, anything will make you crack up.

Characters can get under your skin when you play them for a long time. Bill Treacher, who played Arthur Fowler, said he found himself crying at home all the time when his character had to have a nervous breakdown. Sometimes I'll feel down and realise it's because of a depressing plot. If you're playing a real drama like Hedda Gabler, you just kill yourself and go home and it's over. But a soap like this is day after day and it stays with you.

John Altman (Nick Cotton)

They wanted an East End boy to play Nick and I was from Berkshire. So I picked a random Hoxton street name from the London A-Z and gave it as mine, then told them my father was a truck driver, even though he worked for the Bank of England.

At the start, I relished Nick's nastiness. I can get very heated and shout at the TV, but otherwise Nick and I have nothing in common. While it was liberating to play an out-and-out villain, people do still confuse me with the character and I have had abuse thrown at me. Oddly enough, whenever I've had to drive through the East End, I've got lost. A van driver who saw me consulting a map once said: "Nick, you of all people ought to know your way around!"

Julia was a formidable character. I used to sarcastically call the set St Julia's. She sacked the woman who was meant to play Angie Watts a few days before filming started. The person we'd spent weeks rehearsing with vanished; Julia reckoned she wasn't right. Anita Dobson arrived on set and was much feistier. A few months later, Julia wrote me out for about a year when I protested that Nick wasn't the kind of man who would start a gay relationship with Lofty, another straight character.

I did sometimes feel frustrated that they didn't make more of Nick. They'd use him to pack a punch and make a headline at the expense of longer-term plots. I'd like him to have spent more time on the square and shown other sides to his character. June and I protested when they killed off my on-screen son and dad because it was a missed opportunity to follow a really dysfunctional family.

Although I was vile to my mother on screen, off screen June became like a second mother. We'd always try to get together with a ciggie in the dressing room before a scene and tinker about with our lines. The hardest part was when Nick was on heroin. I grew my hair and they coloured my teeth with green and yellow enamel – so convincingly that security once refused to let me in. I'm a fastidious person, though. In one scene, Nick was meant to smell like a down-and-out; Sue Tully (Michelle) laughed because I was actually wafting aftershave in my wake.